Irwin Stelzer | The Spectator columnists & writers

Don’t listen to Obama - real Americans want Brexit

Because Americans love Britain, and because we are a presumptuous lot, we often advise the United Kingdom on its foreign policy. And not only the UK, but Europe. Successive US administrations have urged European nations to form a United States of Europe as an answer to the question attributed to Henry Kissinger: ‘Who do I call if I want to call Europe?’ The latest such unrequested advice was offered to your Prime Minister by no less a foreign-policy maven — see his successes in Libya, Middle East, China, Crimea — than Barack Obama. The outgoing president informed David Cameron that his administration wants to see ‘a strong United Kingdom in a strong European Union’. He seemed to assume that, in the words of the Sinatra ballad, you can’t have one without the other.

Americans for Brexit

Do not resuscitate

No one can fault the doctors: they are using every tool available to them to save their very ill patient. But they will probably fail in their efforts to save the euro in its current form. And this will be because the regimen they originally prescribed did more harm than good. Economists were almost unanimous in warning that it is beyond the wisdom of man to set an interest rate that suits 16 countries without also unifying fiscal policy, creating income transfer mechanisms, and a common language to reduce barriers to labour mobility. So we have Ireland, a country that devised a low-tax path to prosperity. Rather than raising interest rates to cool its overheating economy, the European Central Bank kept area-wide interest rates low to suit Germany.

Picking losers

So we are to have a new industrial policy, this one courtesy of the coalition government and, more specifically, George Osborne and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Transport Secretary. Both are economically literate, professing faith in markets as allocators of resources; but they have found the lure of shaping the economy in their image irresistible.The goals of the new industrial policy are two: to reduce the relative importance of financial services, and to disperse economic activity more widely throughout the nation. In pursuit of the first we have bank-bashing that will discourage the growth of financial institutions, limits on bonuses, an increase in the marginal tax rate to an effective 52 per cent, and acceptance of four new Europe-wide regulators just when our own regulators are least able to stave off expansionist Eurocrats.

What Washington thought of Cameron: smooth, genial, evasive — and tough

He came, he saw and, to the surprise of many in Washington, David Cameron conquered. Those who have been exposed to his personal charm were less surprised. For them, the surprise — perhaps they should have known better than to be surprised —- came from his willingness to resort to evasion. Faced with a specific question about his attitude towards Israel, the Prime Minister gave the usual answer about a two-state solution, the need for negotiations, etc. A few days later, before a Muslim rather than an American audience, he decided that Gaza is a prison, without mentioning that Hamas is the jailer, and that there are few prisons in which the inmates launch rockets at neighbouring countries.Perhaps because of their shared hostility towards Israel, the Prime Minister hit it off better with the American President than any since Tony Blair who found a third-way partner in Bill Clinton and a companion-in-arms in George W.

Requiem for a heavyweight

It’s a dirty business. When you’re on top, everyone wants something from you; when you’re not, well, as Billie Holiday says, ‘God bless the child that’s got his own.’ It is a business of sharp elbows, few loyalties, and one in which winning is all that matters. That’s how Rod Serling describes the boxing racket in his Requiem for a Heavyweight. He could just as well have been describing politics. Tony Blair might have been the Labour party’s meal ticket (as Margaret Thatcher was the Tories’) through three general elections, just as Serling’s boxer was the meal ticket for his managers and entourage. But when a boxer, even a champion, gets a bit punchy, when his winning streak seems to be coming to an end, dump him in favour of a more clunking fist.

Who would lend to a bankrupt Britain?

Alistair Darling’s budget forecasts assume that Britain can keep borrowing all it wants for the foreseeable future.We may not be so lucky, says Irwin StelzerFederico Sturzenegger and Jeromin Zettelmeyer are not exactly household names. They are, respectively, professor at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and an adviser to the International Monetary Fund. Some months ago, as I watched Britain roll up debts that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, I moved their book, published in 2006, from a back shelf to the top of my desk. Where it sat, unmolested, until two things happened.First, rating agencies got nervous about the quality of the sovereign debt issued by the UK. Next, Dubai World asked its creditors for time to meet its obligation to pay interest on $26 billion of its $80 billion of debt.

Tips for the new US ambassador

Obama’s man in London needs to stop bashing Bush, immerse himself in domestic political discourse, and get out and meet some true Brits, says Irwin Stelzer‘He is not even a diplomat,’ sniffed BBC News when Louis Susman took up his post as America’s ambassador to the Court of St James. An Obama Chicago crony, the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill rushed to point out from his perch in Washington — ‘a little bit of Chicago’s ruthless and combative political machine is soon to descend on the decorous calm of the Court of St James’. Because Susman had donated some $200,000 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and hoovered up so much more campaign cash — an estimated $1 million — that he earned the title of ‘vacuum cleaner’, the chairman of the American Academy of Diplomacy, lifelong professional diplomat Thomas Pickering, told the BBC that the appointment smacks of ‘simony’, the ecclesiastical crime of paying for holy offices or positions in the hierarchy.

This shotgun marriage of minds between Labour and the Tories won’t last

It just might be that out of the shouting at Prime Minister’s Questions, the sallies and charges, a set of sensible fiscal and financial policies is emerging. The leader of the opposition is right: Labour is planning to cut capital spending in half in the next few years. The Prime Minister is also right: the cuts result from a decision to bring forward into these recession years spending that had been planned for what policymakers call ‘the out years’. That decision inflates spending this year, but will reduce it in later years, unless when the time comes Brown can’t bring himself to ‘cut’, which might be the reason he has cancelled next year’s comprehensive spending review. Meanwhile, Brown is right: if you look at a several-year total, he is not cutting spending, and the Tories are right that if you compare later years with this one, he is indeed doing just that.

No more consensus: this time there is a choice

The next election will present voters with two distinct futures, says Irwin Stelzer: Labour’s rising taxes and love of the EU, or the Tories’ spending cuts and plans for the ‘broken society’Where is the clear blue water? MPs in both the Labour and the Tory parties have engaged in behaviour that is illegal, or tawdry, or both. Both parties are responsible for the dire financial condition in which the country finds itself, Labour by spending and spending during the fat years, the Tories by promising to spend just as much if given the chance, instead of calling for restraint. Both parties will have to cut spending in the future, although the Prime Minister continues to denounce ‘Tory cuts’, either because he is ‘delusional as well as dishonest’, to quote Matthew d’Ancona, or ‘has a weakness for inexactitude when it come to figures’, to borrow Andrew Rawnsley’s delicious phrase.

This is how you should use your reprieve, Gordon

Irwin Stelzer says the PM should seize the opportunity presented by this stay of execution: plot a path to fiscal sanity, cut red tape and restore Britain’s stature on the world stageNow that Gordon Brown is determined to go down with the Labour ship, or to sink it, if you believe his harshest critics, he might want to consider a few things he can do in the short time left to him at Number 10 to enable historians to be kinder to him. Leave office he might be forced to do after the general election he has so long resisted. But it remains open to him to do so with a sense of satisfaction that, on present form, will be denied him. Of course, nothing is certain in politics. Remember Harry Truman, who in my country took a victory turn thumbing his nose at headlines announcing that he had lost the 1948 election? Or John Major in yours? Two developments might save the Prime Minister’s bacon.

Sarkozy’s dream of taming America is doomed

The American model of lightly regulated capitalism may be in disrepute, says Irwin Stelzer. But the French President’s ambition is deludedFrench presidents/emperors are given to delusion. Napoleon thought he could conquer the Russian winter. Charles de Gaulle thought he heard voices anointing him the leader of the Free French, and later deluded himself into believing that he — not the British and the Americans, not Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt — liberated France from the Nazis, to whom the massive French army had quickly surrendered just a few years earlier.And now we have Nicolas Sarkozy. Taller than Napoleon, shorter than de Gaulle, but equally susceptible to delusions. And more than one.

The Tory quest for a fiscal Holy Grail is doomed

Brown’s golden rules have been exposed as a sham, says Irwin Stelzer, but the Tory response has been feeble. Their target should be the PM’s feathering of Old Labour nestsThe good news is that Gordon Brown’s golden rules are no more. These rules did not stop the then chancellor from launching a spending binge. They did not stop him from spilling red ink all over the nation’s books at a time when the flow of cash into the Treasury was at record levels. They did not stop him from raising taxes, 60 times by some counts. They did not stop him from redistributing income from wealth-creators to wealth-consumers. What the rules did do was provide the curtain behind which this latter-day Wizard of Oz could hide, give him the distraction on which magicians rely to prevent audiences from following their sleight-of-hand.

Brown must stop sounding like a sore winner

‘I was born for this moment,’ Gordon Brown is said to have told a small group at a recent dinner party. The Prime Minister is too keen a student of history not to have known that he was parroting Winston Churchill’s famous remark on becoming Prime Minister in 1940, ‘I felt... that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ Perhaps it was reasonable of him to contend that the current financial crisis is as dire a threat to the British way of life as Adolf Hitler, perhaps not. But why quibble? The Prime Minister is entitled to his bump in the polls, the new spring in his step: ‘a dour man rejuvenated by the gloom’, according to my Sunday Times colleagues. The nation certainly faces a grave economic threat, and Brown has reason to feel he has risen to the occasion with a plan that might prove every bit as important as his long-ago decision to grant the Bank of England partial independence.

Politics | 11 October 2008

Gordon Brown’s critics are confused. For months they have been accusing him of dithering, of timidity, of being unable to make the bold moves that are needed if his government is to get a grip on the unfolding problems in the financial sector and, now, in the economy as a whole.Now that he has shown more than a bit of both decisiveness and courage by bringing Peter Mandelson back from what most fair-minded people recognise is a credible stint as European trade commissioner, the critics have shifted gears. Mandelson is not the man to help craft policies with which to fight the emerging economic crisis because... well, because he is Peter Mandelson. Twice forced to resign ministerial positions, the first time for financial indiscretions related to his taste for the high life, the second because Tony Blair was too nervous to wait for the exoneration that came after a careful investigation.

Politics | 13 August 2008

Irwin Stelzer reviews the week in politics There are several ways one might look at Gordon Brown’s leaked plan to send £150 to each of the seven-plus million families receiving child benefit. The first, and kindest, is as an attempt to ease the coming winter’s budget strain on what Sir Brian Bender, permanent secretary at the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, during a first-class train ride from Leeds to London, too loudly dubbed ‘ordinary people’ — not the needy, the more numerous ‘ordinary’. The second is as a straight-out election bribe, part of the ‘fight-back’ that the Prime Minister is planning for the autumn. Why he imagines that this will offset the unpopularity his policies and dithering have brought down upon his head escapes most observers.

Obama and McCain offer a choice, not an echo

In the Republican corner it is to be John Sidney McCain III, white, age 71. In the Democratic corner we have Barack Hussein Obama, black, age 46. No American election battle since the days of Franklin Roosevelt has attracted so much worldwide attention. A recent visitor to North Korea, a nation supposedly hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, tells me that the first question his ‘minder’ asked was: ‘Who will win the American elections?’ His concern is unsurprising: a President McCain would favour continuing existing multilateral pressure on North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons, and might even give some meaning to the phrase ‘or else’. President Obama would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to talk things over, no preconditions.

Balls wants a 100 per cent tax on inherited brains

Irwin Stelzer admires the Schools Secretary, and so regrets that his admissions policy prevents schools from taking account of a pupil’s prospects of success. Bad news all roundSeemingly alone among my acquaintances, I see virtues in Ed Balls. He certainly is not media-friendly, partly because he has the Brownian habit of trying to bury questioners under a barrage of verbiage, only some small portion of which is relevant to their questions. He does have the annoying habit of believing that facts can be the enemy of truth, and therefore need, er, adjustment before they can be made available to the less skilled at their interpretation.Still, it is impossible not to admire his quick intelligence, his ability to translate complicated economic ideas into policy.

Go nuclear, but keep your hand on your wallet

John Hutton, the energetic Secretary of State for Business and a few other things, has reason to be pleased with the expressions of ‘significant interest’ in constructing new nuclear power plants that he has received from British Energy, EDF Energy, E.ON UK and Iberdrola — the British, French, German and Spanish utilities — respectively. These are among the handful of companies in the world with the knowhow and financial resources to build and then successfully operate these capital-intensive and complicated plants.The government’s case for the need for new nuclear plants is straightforward. The nation’s ten existing plants will be shut down by 2023, reducing this low-carbon source of energy from 19 per cent of the nation’s total to 6 per cent.

The economic consequences of Mr Brown

Gordon Brown might be overstating his case when he ignores his Thatcherite inheritance and a benign global economic environment, and takes sole credit for Britain’s rather good economic performance during his tenure at No. 11. But, asked whether they are better off now than a decade ago, most Britons would have to agree that in material terms their lives have improved during Brown’s tenure at the Treasury, and that his decisions to keep Britain out of the euro and to grant a sort of independence to the Bank of England (Brown still selects the Bank’s inflation target, and decides whether the Governor is to be reappointed or let out to pasture) were good policies indeed. And the Prime Minister’s critics might be overstating their own case when they claim that Brown’s policies have led us to the brink of a collapse of the financial system, but they are certainly right that we are entering a period of financial strain and slower economic growth with the nation’s finances in worrying condition, and have a reasonable argument that at least some of today’s problems are the consequences of the tax, spending and borrowing policies pursued by the Prime Minister when at the Treasury.

Guess what? Gordon has done something right

Spare a moment for a story in which Gordon Brown is the good guy. Not as exciting as tales of the money trail from David Abrahams to the Labour party’s coffers; nor as bloodcurdling as tales of crimes committed by untold numbers of illegal immigrants; nor as nervous-making as the possibility of identity theft from tens of millions of lost HM Revenue and Customs files; nor as economically immediate as tales of a busted bank. But of more enduring consequence for Britain’s economy and its social structure.Soon, very soon if City rumours are correct, some top executives will face criminal charges — not from overzealous American cops, but from Britain’s very own cartel busters. This will be the first time that businessmen who conspire to fix prices and overcharge consumers face more than a slap on the wrist.

Brown has outsourced British foreign policy

Now we know. Until now, we Americans have been wondering whether we were witnessing from the new boy on the foreign policy stage a cock-up or a considered change in Britain’s policy towards the United States. When Gordon Brown exclaimed that he would never have appointed the man who wears his hatred of the American president and the neoconservatives as ‘a badge of honour’ had he known how offensive Malloch Brown would be to George Bush and the Americans, there was an inclination to believe him, even though it taxed credulity to think the Prime Minister had been so badly briefed. When the Prime Minister ‘went out of his way to be unhelpful’, in the words of one participant at the Bush–Brown meeting in Camp David, there was some willingness to attribute Brown’s frosty behaviour to his need to placate the Labour Left by distancing himself from Tony Blair’s approach to the President, and to a natural Scottish reserve.

Listen to Adam Smith: inheritance tax is good

Politics trumps economics. That’s the best summary of the Tory and Labour competition to pander to those who until now have been threatened with paying to the Treasury a portion of the money they receive for just ‘being there’.Let’s de-emotionalise this issue. An inheritance tax is not a death duty. The slogan ‘No taxation without respiration’ is too clever by half. Even a Chancellor of the Exchequer as powerful as the previous occupant of the office could not get a corpse to sign a cheque. It is a tax paid by the recipient of this income, the inheritor, the lucky winner in the sperm lottery. Nor, finally, is it a tax on a lifetime of thrift. In most cases the wealth being taxed results from a rise in the value of houses — not something brought about by the acumen and hard work of the owner, but by a decade of low interest rates and economic growth, or the good fortune of having a public amenity plunked down in the neighbourhood.

Brown and his critics must admit their errors

Not even his severest critics doubt Gordon Brown’s intelligence. They might object to the causes in which it has been enlisted, but they knew that it is both formidable and restless. Nor do the Prime Minister’s critics doubt that he has a coherent vision of where he wants to take Great Britain, what sort of society he would like to create (the assumption being that it is in his power to do just that). Again, they might disagree on the consequences of striving for greater equality of income and wealth distribution, or the efficacy of stuffing an unreformed public sector with cash. But they have no doubt that Gordon Brown knows where he is going.Nor, in their quieter moments, should his critics disagree with some of the policies he brought with him to No.

No more Mr Nice Guy

Smile and shoeshine get you only so far in any business, says Irwin Stelzer. But Labour is still vulnerable if the Tory leader produces solid conservative policies David Cameron is confused. Understandably. For two reasons. First, those who are urging him to abandon policy-lite in favour of more heft are the very same who favour policies that would lead to disaster at the polls. The result is confusion between the need to reject the specific policies they propose, and the need to offer voters something more than a smile and shoeshine, to borrow from Arthur Miller. There are, after all, policies and there are policies. There are policies based on Euro- paranoia, and policies that reflect a healthy scepticism of the emerging European superstate.

Now we know: Brown is a European, not an Atlanticist

There is little doubt, as Matthew d’Ancona and others have pointed out, that Gordon Brown is secure in the thought that he has established himself as what is called these days a ‘change agent’, cutting the ground out from Tory cries that ‘It’s time for a change.’ If you want change, go for the experienced clunking fist rather that the PR tyro.Unfortunately, not all change is in Britain’s interest. Which brings me to the by now, or at any rate soon to be, forgotten visit of the Prime Minister to President Bush’s retreat at Camp David. You know — the visit that the press hailed as a triumph for Brown because he (a) forced the ever-courteous George Bush to forswear his cowboy boots and open-necked shirt in favour of a jacket and tie, (b) described the discussions as ‘full and frank’, the unpleasant diplomatic term usually reserved for meetings with such as Bashar al-Assad, and (c) generated headlines from the right (‘End of the affair’, Daily Mail), left (‘Brown fails to praise Bush at summit’, Guardian, front page) and centre (‘Mr Brown noticeably failed to return such compliments’, the Times) that represent PR coups of the sort that have made David Cameron what he is today.

Go west to discover the true America

‘Go West, young man, go West,’ newspaper editor Horace Greeley advised ambitious 19th-century Americans as the nation pursued its Manifest Destiny. Well, it might have been Greeley, or perhaps John Babson Lane Soule, editor of the Terre Haute (Indiana) Daily Express. No matter the author: the advice is as applicable today as it was 150 years ago — and not only for young men.After a stint in the rancorous atmosphere of our nation’s capital, where resurgent Democrats are out to prove that another surge, this one in Iraq, is doomed to failure, I headed west on a business trip. America’s Manifest Destiny, of course, has already been fulfilled. We long ago ‘overspread the continent allotted by Providence’, to borrow from John L.

Brown’s premiership will be short

In guessing at the shape of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we have to ignore two groups. First, there are the idolaters, the inner clique that believes, really believes, that application of the Brown intellect to the social and foreign policy problems facing Britain will cause those problems to crumble under the pounding of that clunking fist. More of what has been on offer from No. 11 is all that is needed at No. 10.Then there are the critics so blinded by their hatred of Gordon Brown for his stealth taxes, his pension raid, his redistributionist proclivities, his secrecy, his clannishness, his Scottishness, his unpressed clothes — or their exclusion from his circle — that they are unable to recognise his virtues and accomplishments.

America: you’ll miss it when it’s gone

Don’t say Tony Blair didn’t warn you that you won’t like a world in which America has decided to become a self-centred spectator rather than a player. That day seems to be approaching, a response to the self-indulgent anti-Americanism that has become so fashionable in Britain and Europe. The American presidential election campaign is about to get serious, and sooner than usual, since about half of all the delegates to the nominating conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties will have been chosen less than a year from now. In the absence of the emergence of some dark horse, the Democrats will either nominate Hillary Clinton (the Rodham will be dropped for the duration of the campaign), a candidate of the centre-Left; the very-Left Barack Obama, his emollience and what passes for charisma these days concealing his 100 per cent liberal voting record and uncertain grasp of the issues; or the hard-Left John Edwards, a smiley version of shrieky Howard Dean.